Chapter 1White Harlem

Foreword

I came to this book from the wrong end. I was not looking for George Carlin. I was reading a Supreme Court opinion for an unrelated reason, and I got to the appendix.

FCC v. Pacifica Foundation is reported at 438 U.S. 726 and was decided on July 3, 1978. It is one of the most cited decisions in American broadcasting law and the reason every station in the country still watches the clock. Attached to it, as part of the public record, is a transcript of the monologue the case was about. I had been told what that monologue was for as long as I could remember. Everybody has. It is the seven words, from Class Clown, the famous one, the one that is played on anniversaries and quoted in obituaries and taught as the moment an American comedian took on the censors and won.

It is not that routine. The monologue in the appendix is "Filthy Words," which was recorded at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California on March 2 and 3, 1973, nine months after the famous one, and released that October on an album called Occupation: Foole. It is four and a half minutes longer and it has three more words in it. It is the sequel.

Then I read the disposition, and the vote was five to four, and it went against Pacifica.

I want to be precise about what surprised me, because it was not the misattribution on its own. Reference works make mistakes. What surprised me was the shape of the error, which is not random. Every element of the popular version is wrong in the direction that improves the story. The routine has been swapped for the more famous one. The outcome has been reversed. The party who actually fought — the Pacifica Foundation, a listener-funded radio network that spent five years and its subscribers' money refusing to back down — has been deleted and replaced by a comedian who was not a party to the case, was never called, and had no idea the broadcast was happening. And the one criminal proceeding George Carlin actually was a party to, an arrest in a public park in Milwaukee on July 21, 1972 for performing the routine, dismissed that December, has vanished entirely. He won the case he was in. He lost the case he was not in. Nobody remembers either correctly.

That is a book, and I thought for a while that it was the whole book. It is not. It is the way in.

Because once I had gone back to the recordings to sort out which routine was which, I kept listening, and the thing I found is the reason this took four years instead of one.

The seven-words material is not what I had been led to expect. It is not an attack and it is barely a provocation. It is a man in love with the English language, standing in front of four thousand people at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on May 27, 1972, counting — proposing a category, testing its edges, delighted by how strange it is that a species should have arranged such a thing without ever writing it down. It is generous work. It assumes the room is clever. Its governing pronoun is we: we all know these words, we all learned them without instruction, isn't this remarkable.

Then I listened to You Are All Diseased, which aired in 1999, and the pronoun had changed.

That is the subject of this book. The rest of it — the childhood on West 121st Street in a neighborhood he insisted on calling White Harlem, the three schools and the Air Force and the general discharge, the eight years in a coat and tie doing an act he did not believe, the break, the arrest, the case, the four silent years, the debt, the arenas, the wife who died the day before his sixtieth birthday, the daughter who published what it had been like from the inside, and the machine that made an hour in his voice sixteen years after he died — is arranged around a single question. Something withdrew between 1972 and 1999. This book tries to say when.

It can try because of an accident of the trade. Comedians leave better evidence than almost anybody. A novelist's development is inferred from finished books that took years and were revised in private. A comedian's is on tape: performed to a room, on a date, released with a catalog number, timed to the second. George Carlin made more than twenty albums and fourteen hours for HBO across forty-five years. That is not a body of work. It is a series of measurements of one instrument, taken at intervals, and nobody has yet read it as one.

Two other things made this book possible and neither existed for the previous one. James Sullivan's Seven Dirty Words, published in 2010, remains the standard single-volume life and is very good on the mechanics of the clubs and the record business. It came out five years before Kelly Carlin's memoir and twelve years before Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio's documentary. A daughter's account of that household and an archive put on screen are not footnotes; they change what the middle of the life looks like. This is the first general biography that can use both.

A word about what this book will not do.

It will not tell you whether the late Carlin was a moralist out of patience or a performer who had stopped liking his audience. I began convinced it was the second and I am no longer convinced of anything, and the evidence supports both readings, and saying so is not fence-sitting — it is the finding. What I will do is put the dates in order and give you the standard by which to judge, and the standard is his: in 1990, criticizing another comedian, he said that comedy picks on people in power, and that women and gays and immigrants are the underdogs. He supplied the measuring instrument. Holding him to it is the only fair test there is, because it is the one he chose.

It will also not narrate what it does not know. Two phases of this life rest almost entirely on the subject's own account, given decades later — the childhood, and the break of 1969 to 1971 — and there is a third, the drug years, where he is very nearly the only witness. Where that is the case, the text says so. It says so about the Las Vegas firing that anchors every version of the conversion story and that two searches failed to confirm. It says so about the three courts-martial that are in every profile and are in nobody's copy of the service record, because nobody has requested it. It says so about the Milwaukee case, which is a week's work in a Wisconsin archive and has never been done.

That will slow the book down in places. I think the cost is worth paying, for a reason that is specific to this subject rather than general. This book intends to tell you that the single most widely known thing about George Carlin is wrong in every particular. It has no business asking you to accept that unless it is visibly honest about the small things first.

A note on the shape, since it is not the usual one.

Twenty-two chapters is a great many for a comedian and the reason is the tape. Because the recordings are dated, the middle of this life can be examined at a resolution that most biographies cannot reach, and the book spends that resolution where the question is: eight chapters cover the thirty-five years to 1972, and fourteen cover the thirty-six after it.

That is deliberate and it inverts the usual proportion. The standard account of George Carlin front-loads the transformation — the hair, the arrest, the case — and treats the last twenty-five years as a long, well-attended coda in which a famous man got angrier.

The last twenty-five years are where the evidence is. They contain eleven of the fourteen HBO hours, the working method he adopted in his fifties and kept until he died, the addiction, two cardiac events, the death of his wife, and the change in the pronoun that this book exists to date.

A reader who wants the counterculture years at length will find them thinner here than elsewhere. A reader who wants to know what happened to the man afterward will find, I hope, more than has been assembled before.

He printed the seven words, so this book prints them. He would have regarded any other choice as the argument conceding itself, and he would have been right.

Chapter 1 · White Harlem

Morningside Heights is a shelf of high ground on the west side of Manhattan, and it has always been a seam rather than a place. The university sits on top of it. To the south are the blocks that think of themselves as belonging to the university, and to the north and east the ground falls away toward Harlem, and the streets in between belonged in the 1930s and 1940s to the people who could afford them, which meant Irish and German and Italian families in walk-up apartments, and the children of those families in the street, and a parish church with a school attached. West 121st Street runs across that seam. It is four blocks long. A boy raised on it in 1940 could stand at one end of his own street and be in one country and walk to the other end and be in another, and the distance was nothing at all.

George Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, at New York Hospital in Manhattan, and he grew up on that street, and for the rest of his life he refused to call the neighborhood by its name. He called it White Harlem. He said it in interviews for forty years and he eventually put it on a record: "White Harlem," four minutes and forty-five seconds, side one of Occupation: Foole, released in October 1973, when he was thirty-six and had been working in front of audiences for fourteen years. The claim in the phrase is worth pausing over, because it is the first argument he ever made in public about language and it contains, in miniature, everything he would later be famous for. Morningside Heights was the name on the map, and the name on the map was a real-estate name, and real-estate names are written by people who want to sell something. White Harlem was the name the boys on the block used. It was less flattering, less respectable, and — this was the point — more accurate about which side of the seam they were standing on. He preferred it because it was true, and because saying it made respectable people uncomfortable, and it is not possible, at this distance, to weigh those two motives against each other. It is only possible to observe that they arrived together and stayed together for fifty years.

Everything else about the childhood is harder.

The difficulty is not that the years are undocumented in the ordinary sense. It is that almost the only witness is the subject. The continuous first-person account of Carlin's childhood, his schooling, his Air Force years and his first breakdown as a performer comes from Last Words, published by Free Press in 2009, a year after his death, and assembled by Tony Hendra out of interviews taped over a period of years for an autobiography Carlin had not finished. It is the fullest source in the file and it has to carry a great deal, and it is worth stating plainly, once, what it is: it is testimony, given by a professional storyteller about himself, and it is not certain how much of the sentence-level prose belongs to the man on the tapes and how much to the man who assembled them. Reviewers divided on the question when the book appeared and the question has not been settled since. It cannot be settled; the tapes are not public and the two men who made the book are both dead. This account will use Last Words constantly and will treat it throughout as what a subject says about himself rather than as what is known about him.

There is a second disclosure that belongs here, at the first substantive use of that book, and nowhere else. In 2004 Jessica Hendra publicly alleged that her father, Tony Hendra, had sexually abused her as a child; the allegations were reported in the New York Times by N. R. Kleinfield on July 1, 2004, and she set them out at length the following year in her own book, How to Cook Your Daughter. Tony Hendra denied the allegations categorically. They were never tested in any court and no finding was ever made. The reason to record this in a life of George Carlin is narrow and specific: the credibility of Carlin's posthumous memoir is a live question in this book, and its co-author's own credibility was publicly contested in his lifetime. Having stated it, this book will not return to it.

So: the household, on the terms the record allows.

Carlin's father was Patrick John Carlin, born in 1888. He was an advertising manager at the New York Sun, which is to say he held a real job at a real newspaper in a business that ran on persuasion, and he was, by every account including his son's, a gifted talker — a prize-winning after-dinner speaker, a man who could be given a room and asked to fill it and would fill it. He was also a drinker. Those two facts are given together in every version of the story because they arrived together in the life, and the temptation for a biographer is to make the second explain the first or the first excuse the second, and neither move is available on this evidence.

Carlin's mother was Mary Bearey, born in 1896. She left her husband and took the children, and the interval is where the record first goes soft. It is commonly given as two months after George's birth — weeks, in any case; the child was an infant. That figure appears in the literature and it comes, ultimately, from the family. No document has been produced to fix it. It is a small thing and it does not change the shape of the life, and it is set down here as an approximation because that is what it is. A biography that prints an unsourced interval as a fact in its first chapter has told the reader something about how it will behave in its twentieth.

There was an older brother, Patrick Jr., born in 1931, five and a half years ahead, who lived until 2022 and outlasted his brother by fourteen years. Two boys, then, and a mother who worked, in an apartment on a street where the rent was manageable because the neighborhood was not fashionable. That is the house. It is not a house of deprivation in the sense that would organize a different kind of book; there was work and there was schooling and there was, by his own account, affection, and there was also a very great deal of Mary Bearey's will holding the arrangement upright, because in New York in 1940 a separated Catholic woman raising two sons alone had no institutional support of any kind and the arrangement stayed upright only for as long as she did.

Patrick John Carlin died in 1945, when George was eight. Father and son never really met. That sentence is doing a strange amount of work and it should be unpacked: they were not estranged in the way that implies a rupture, because there had never been a relationship to rupture. The boy had been an infant when the household divided. What he inherited from his father was not a memory but a set of reports — that he had been charming, that he had been able to hold a room, that he had been a drinker, that his absence was the condition of the family's peace. It is the most consequential kind of absence: a father who exists entirely as other people's descriptions.

And here the biographer's temptation arrives at full strength, because the shape is so neat. A man who could stand up after dinner and win prizes for talking produced a son who spent forty-five years standing up in rooms and talking, and the son never knew him. It is very hard to write those two facts in sequence without an implication forming in the white space between them. The implication is unearned. There is no evidence that Carlin modeled himself on a man he did not remember, and there is a good deal of evidence that he built his act out of the street, the radio, the parish and his own reading. What can be said honestly is smaller and more interesting: he grew up knowing that talking well in front of people was a thing a Carlin could do, because he had been told so about a man he had never met, and he grew up in a house where that gift was discussed in the same breath as the drinking that came with it. He had, from the beginning, the idea that the talent and the trouble were related. He did not have to invent that idea later; it was furniture.

The street did the rest. What Carlin claimed all his life about West 121st Street was that it taught him rhythm — that a block where several kinds of English were spoken at once, and where the boys competed in insult and mimicry as a matter of daily business, was an education in the sound of the language available nowhere else. The claim is unfalsifiable and it is also entirely ordinary; every comedian who grew up in a city says a version of it. What makes it worth keeping in Carlin's case is that it names the specific thing he was good at, which was not jokes. He was never, at any point in his career, a first-rate constructor of jokes in the traditional sense, and he did not try to be. What he had, from the earliest recordings, was an ear: an ability to hear a phrase that everyone else had stopped hearing, hold it up, turn it over, and make an audience notice that it was strange. That is a skill you acquire by listening to people talk, in quantity, when you are young, in a place where they talk in several different ways at once.

The other formative sound was the radio, and it is the more traceable of the two, because it shows up in the work almost immediately. When he began recording, the parodies were broadcast parodies: a disc jockey, a newsman, a weatherman. He did not do family material or dating material or the standard nightclub inventory of the period. He did media. The first act he built was an act about the voices that came out of the box, and a child who spent the 1940s in an apartment in Morningside Heights listening to those voices had been rehearsing that act for a decade before he knew there was such a job.

There was also the church, but that belongs to the next chapter, because Corpus Christi was a school before it was an argument.

What should be resisted, in a first chapter, is the retrospective tidying that turns a childhood into an explanation. The literature on Carlin is not free of it. The story as usually told runs: absent alcoholic father, formidable mother, Catholic school, expulsion, uniform, disgrace, and then the man who spent his life attacking authority — and every link in that chain is available in the sources, and the chain as a whole is too good. It was assembled, in the first instance, by Carlin himself, in interviews, over decades, refining as he went. He was a professional. He knew what a story needed. When the same man tells the same anecdote for fifty years with the same beats, the consistency is not corroboration; it is craft, which is a different thing and in some ways the opposite thing.

What can be held with confidence at the end of 1945 is short. A boy of eight, on a four-block street in upper Manhattan, in an apartment kept by a working mother, with an older brother, a dead father he did not know, a parish school, a radio, and an ear. Everything after that is the record of what he did with those, and the record — this is the argument of the whole book — is unusually good. Comedians leave the best evidence of any artists, because their work is performed to a room, on a date, and released with a catalog number. From 1963 to 2008 George Carlin produced more than twenty albums and fourteen HBO specials, each with a recording date and a running time, and taken together they constitute something no biography of him has yet used properly: a series of measurements of the same instrument, taken at intervals, over forty-five years.

The last third of this book is going to argue that the instrument changed, and that the change can be dated. That argument is only worth making if the first third establishes what it changed from. So it is worth saying now, at the start, what the young voice sounded like, because it is not what most people who invoke Carlin remember.

The famous routine — the one that gave a Supreme Court case its subject and gave the language a phrase it still uses — is an act of affection. It is a man who loves English standing in front of four thousand people counting words, delighted, inviting them to be delighted with him. It has almost no anger in it. Its posture toward the audience is a we: we all know these words, we all know we are not supposed to say them, is that not a wonderfully strange thing for a species to have arranged. It is generous. Whatever else this book concludes about the last decade of his life, it will not be able to conclude that the man who made that recording was fighting the people in the room.

A word, finally, about the method of this book, since the first chapter is where a reader decides whether to trust one.

Biography has a standing temptation with subjects like this, and it is not the temptation to flatter. It is the temptation to narrate — to write the undocumented years in the same confident third person as the documented ones, so that the seams do not show and the reader is never troubled by the difference between a birth certificate and an anecdote told to a tape recorder in 2005. It produces a smoother book. It also, in a life where two entire phases rest on the subject's own uncorroborated account, produces a book that is substantially fiction in its opening chapters and does not say so. The childhood is one of those phases. The break of 1969 to 1971 is the other. Both are weak in exactly the same way: the only witness is the man himself, speaking long afterward, with a story to tell and the professional means to tell it well.

So this book will keep its seams visible. Where a document exists it will be relied on. Where the only source is Carlin, the reader will be told that the only source is Carlin, and the claim will stand or fall in the open. Where a thing is simply not known — whether the tape of the broadcast survives; how much of the posthumous memoir is his phrasing; what he privately concluded about the case that made him famous for something he did not do — it will be recorded as not known, once, without hedging in either direction. That method costs something in momentum, particularly early, and it is worth the cost, because the central claim of this book is a correction of the public record, and a book that intends to tell its readers that they have the case, the routine and the outcome backwards had better be visibly honest about smaller things first.

There is a great deal here that is documented, and the balance shifts sharply once he starts recording. From 1972 onward the evidence is extraordinary: recording dates, venues, chart positions, running times to the second, an arrest with a date and a dismissal, a broadcast with a date and a time of day, a Supreme Court opinion with a vote and a set of dissents, four decades of released work. Very few subjects leave anything comparable. The difficulty is concentrated at the two ends — the childhood, and the interior of the last decade — and it is at those two ends that the temptation to narrate is strongest, because they are the parts a reader most wants explained.

He was, in 1937, an infant on West 121st Street with a father he would not meet. The distance from there to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on the evening of May 27, 1972 is thirty-five years, and the first eight chapters of this book are that distance. Almost nothing in them was inevitable, and a good deal of it — the schools, the uniform, the discharge, the suit and tie, the eight years of doing an act he did not believe — points in the wrong direction entirely.